We have a comprehensive integrated development process based on configuration management best practices and "Continuous Integration" principles. All artifacts related to the project are versioned and stored safely in our version control repository, which is backed up regularly. The development team develops using development environment that integrate with our version control mechanism. Code analysis is performed to ensure that codebase corresponds to the coding guidelines. Continuous integration is ensured using a central build / deployment infrastructure and a central integration testing environment. Daily versioning of the project development artifacts ensures a mechanism to rollback to an earlier version at any time. Automation is made
use of to reduce time in daily integration chores.

Benefits

• Continuous integration ensures lesser time to integrate the modifications by different developers.
• Clean central build / deployment / integration testing infrastructure ensures that there are no footprints of development machine involved in the product being tested
• Versioned and backed up codebase enables disaster recovery.
• Regular versioning helps in managing maintenance tasks and enhancements in parallel.
• Coding guidelines improves readability and enhances maintainability, in addition to identifying obvious low-performance code snippets.

System testing process

System testing is performed on an environment that is built as close as possible to the production environment using virtualization. System test cases are developed executed by test engineers on a “build” delivered by the development team. The bugs detected are logged, fixed and tracked to closure through subsequent builds from the development team. Deployment instructions are created and tested during deployment of system testing environment.

Benefits

• Early testing in an environment close to production helps unearth and solve issues early on.
• A virtualized ST environment helps in setting up the ST environment for maintenance purposes and testing the deployment instructions quickly.
• Formal release of “builds” by the development team to the testing team ensures delivery of a "tested build" that is traceable through version control.

Release management and deployment

A package that is already tested and certified by the testing team is chosen for release. Release log and release checklist ensures standard operating procedures are followed for the release and is traceable to a build and a label in the codebase repository.

Benefits

• Since release package has already been tested on the ST environment which is close to the staging / production environment, there is minimal risk of issues with deployment.
• Release packaging with deployment instructions and release notes makes the release self-sufficient and enables separation of development and deployment activities.
• With self-sufficient release packages, we can have common secured release location for multiple projects.
• Maintenance of release log ensures traceability of releases to codebase versions.
• Release checklist ensures basic features of a release package.

Development process and methodology

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 9th, 2008 at 11:39 am and is filed under development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.